Enka

ENKA İnşaat ve Sanayi is an engineering and construction company "headquartered in Istanbul, Turkey" and traded on Borsa Istanbul. Its own history states that it "was founded in 1957 as a partnership between the late Şarık Tara and his brother-in-law, the late Sadi Gülçelik", both civil engineers from Istanbul Technical University. Wikipedia records that Gülçelik died in a plane crash in Saudi Arabia in 1980, after which Tara was sole proprietor. Tara remained Honorary President until his death on 28 June 2018. [1,2,3]

From Contractor To Moscow Landlord

The company dates its Russian work to 1988, under the Turkish–Soviet natural-gas agreement, when it restored the Petrovsky Shopping Arcade and built a 1,000-bed veterans' hospital. MosENKA followed in 1991, "with a mission to renovate historical buildings", and RamENKA in 1997, an equal partnership with Migros that became ENKA TC. That company now "owns office and shopping centers with a total area exceeding 850,000 m²", ten of them malls under the Kapitoly brand, among them Kuntsevo Plaza and Kashirskaya Plaza, the latter opened in March 2018. [1,4,13]

Krasnye Kholmy And The Riverside Towers

In 1995 ENKA signed an investment agreement with the Moscow city government and founded Moskva Krasnye Holmy to build on a seven-hectare plot at the eastern tip of the island between the Moskva and the Vodootvodny Channel. The company is "now wholly owned by ENKA"; its offices are let as the Riverside Towers, 65,500 m² of rentable space. A June 2004 release named ENKA Holding and the Moscow City Government as main shareholders, with Raffles International contracted to manage the hotel. [5,7]

The Hotel

ENKA gives the tower as 35 storeys and 160 metres, built "within 26 months", project dates April 2003 to July 2005, and says it "Opened in September 2005" with 235 rooms. Wikipedia gives July 2005, 34 floors, and 234 rooms including 28 suites. The two readings are printed here; neither is preferred. The rooftop City Space bar is still named on ENKA's pages. [6,8,12]

December 2015

On 30 December 2015 the hotel stopped taking bookings. The Moscow Times, on 7 January 2016, linked this to Russian curbs on Turkish firms adopted on 29 December; Prime quoted an expert who said the suspension was for "неопределенное время". Guests already booked were served. RBC Style was writing about the hotel's twentieth anniversary in September 2025, under the Swissôtel name, which shows it trading again. [9,10,11]

Editorial note — ⚑ No source read gives the date on which room sales resumed after December 2015. ⚑ Opening month (July or September 2005), room count (234 or 235) and storeys (34 or 35) all differ between ENKA and Wikipedia. ⚑ The plain name Krasnye Holmy is the register's reading: ENKA's real-estate page, modified April 2026, still says "under the name Swissotel Krasnye Holmy". ⚑ ENKA TC's listed rentable areas add to about 801,200 m², below its headline 850,000 m²; the gap is not explained.